TITLE: Seas of Titan NAME: Gail Shaw COUNTRY: South Africa EMAIL: gshaw@monotix.co.za WEBPAGE: http://www.rucus.ru.ac.za TOPIC: Seas COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: titan.jpg ZIPFILE: titan.zip RENDERER USED: MegaPov 0.5a TOOLS USED: Rhinocerous 1.1 Demo Leveller 1.4 Paint Shop Pro 5 RENDER TIME: 5 hours 24 min HARDWARE USED: Pentium III 450Mhz 128 MB Ram IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Earth may not be the only body in the solar system with liquid seas. Current scientific theory postulates the existence of seas of ethane on Titan (Saturn's largest moon) Titan is the only moon with an atmosphere thicker than earth's (1.6 times thicker) The atmosphere is primarily hydrogen and methane. Surface temperature is in the region of -170 degrees C. A detailed study of the surface of Titan is planned using the huygens probe The silver things in the foreground? Well what if there's life on Titan, using Saturn's magnetic field for energy.... DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: I spend a good period of time getting the atmosphere looking right. The horizon is built up using two different ground fogs, although the variation doesn't show as well as I would have liked. I used a large transparent inverse sphere to contain the fog as without that the stars and saturn look as though they are within the atmosphere. The terrain in the foreground is made up of heightfields created in leveller. The liquid surface is also height fields, this time created using Pov-Ray and PaintShop Pro. The texture is a simple slope map (MegaPov feature) with rock on the steeper slopes and 'snow' on the flatter. Once the foreground looked reasonable I worked on the far background. The stars are spheres at a massive distance. The rings of Saturn were created using an include file by Sigmund Kyrre Aas based on data by Bj_rn J_nsson. The saturn texture is an image map. (I think that map also came from Bj_rn J_nsson's web site) The meteors are emitting media, contained by a merge of a sphere and a cone. The distant mountains are isosurfaces (Ridged MultiFractals) with the same texture as the front height fields. The odd silvery things were modelled in Rhino, exported as a povray mesh then run through Warp's mesh compressor. I tried adding hair on them, but it didn't look too good, so I left them as is. There are three lights in the scene. 1 main light (Sun), a dim light simulating the sunlight that Saturn reflects, then a shadowless fill light.